Sports Media Psychology // Everything VR & AR Podcast

Back in November, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Everything VR & AR Podcast with terrific host Kevin Harvell. On the hells of the Virtual Reality (VR) Summit conference in San Diego, CA, I was asked to speak about VR in sports. And I emphasized the importance of complementing the game – not replacing it.

“What I’d like to see and where I think things will go is a more transmedia like experience where additive content is disbursed across a unified story experience,” I said. “That is so fans can participate and get different vantage points – figuratively and literally. Everything needs to be additive.”

I have my PhD in Media Psychology – a discipline which studies the relationship between media consumption and human behavior. As technology continues to change, our innate human desires don’t. We’ll always long for connection and story. So media psychology is a field of passion.

“The fundamentals of media psychology converge with those in VR because we’re talking about presence. And to understand presence, we must do our due diligence and investigate identity, mental models, audience engagement, archetypes, and human centered design to craft the perfect story in any space – traditional, augmented, or virtual.”

While still considered to be in the early adopter phase, VR has become a trending topic within the entertainment industry – sports included. I refer to this immersive movement as an “experiential phenomenon,” where box scores and stat lines are no longer enough. Rather fans believe that the experience of sport is greater than any individual game, and VR is just the newest conduit to live in this experience.